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another place to go

November 16, 2014
Musings
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A year ago today I was on the other side of the world, standing in one of the most beautiful cities on Earth: Prague.

It was my first time out of the U.S, and I had flown across the ocean on my own to start an adventure. That’s what I called it. That’s what I was looking for. An adventure. Looking back, thinking about everything I did a year ago, I am amazed. I was so brave. Maybe braver than I am now.

I have spent 7 of the last 12 months traveling and living abroad. A little over a year ago, I hadn’t been anywhere, and now: I’ve eaten street meat on Prague’s cobblestones, wandered around Warsaw, spent a week meeting my relatives in cities and tiny villages all over Ukraine, climbed waterfalls and ridden bare-elephant-back in Bangkok, hunkered down in Seoul, explored Bavaria with my German cousins and my mom, gotten trapped in Toronto in a snowstorm, and eaten raspberry gelato on the riverbanks of Mozart’s hometown, Salzburg, Austria.

Now, I’m tired. I’m home, and my bed is awfully comfortable, let me tell you. My bones are weary. I feel ancient, like I have lived too many lives. I don’t want to go anymore. I want to stay.

But me, I’m for adventures. That’s what I want — at least, I think it still is, for now. Why am I hesitant to keep moving? Isn’t that what we always have to do? Life doesn’t stop. There are so many places to see, so much to do, so many people to meet.

I’m thinking about how people say you shouldn’t work doing what you love, because you might grow to hate it — or something like that. I don’t know if I agree — maybe it’s more like, you shouldn’t let what you love become work. And I’m thinking and worrying that that’s what traveling has become for me. Tiresome. It’s not a vacation anymore, not when it’s a year later and you’re still going. It becomes a different beast, yet still a beautiful one. The challenges change, become more difficult, more stressful, compounding over and over.

There is something beautiful and easy about living in your homeland. The people speak your language (on many levels), you’re used to the food, the culture, the transportation systems, the medical systems, the money, banking. You know where to go, what to do, who to do it with. You have friends, people who you’ve grown up with, whether or not you met them in your childhood. You have history there. It belongs to you. It’s simple. It’s easy; there are no visa requirements, no proof of residency, no need to carry your passport with you wherever you go. No translation apps on standby. No stares because you are different.

It’s too easy. Ask anyone who’s returned from abroad after being away for a significant amount of time. It’s so easy! Everything’s in your own language. You can understand everything people say to you, everything people say to other people, stuff you don’t even want to understand — but you do anyway! You can’t help but listen! There’s so much sound! Sound, noise, a language that finally means something to your brain!

Too easy.

Too familiar.

Isn’t it? Wasn’t it? Or have I lost it, that wonderment at things I don’t understand? I’m no longer in love; un-infatuated with newness. It’s been hard. It’s been unpleasant. It’s been a long time. The honeymoon is over! Where are the divorce papers?! Quick, somebody! Someplace? Save me.

i just want to do weird art shit with my friends

April 10, 2014
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Gold Digging

I have a craving. Sort of like when you’re all, “I really want pancakes for dinner! Someone make me pancakes!” in a really whiny voice, and you say it over and over again until someone serves you a plate of hot pancakes or hits you in the face so you stop using that really annoying voice. Sorry. I like pancakes.

Actually this is not about pancakes at all (although isn’t it really always about pancakes??). It’s about art. (Aren’t pancakes an art? Ok, I’ll stop.) It’s about weird art. How do you classify art as weird? I don’t know, you tell me. What does weird really mean, anyway?

You know. I’m not talking about lovely printed photographs, or museum art, or the odd-looking statues you can find in every large public park. Weird art. You know, like, I want to buy seven pairs of old shoes from Goodwill and spray-paint them gold and then cover them in gold flake and hang them up around town.

I want to paint a mural in the inside of an 19th-century abandoned funeral home. I want to watch people in costumes made out of car parts pretend to be sea monsters and battle each other while dancing around a stage made of recycled pallets and old tires. I want to have an indoor picnic in a room filled with a huge tree made out of cardboard. I want to hammer a pencil onto a wall. I want to throw an all-silver Andy Warhol party and eat food out of aluminum pans covered in aluminum foil while dancing under disco balls and bubble machines. I want to sit in a cafe sipping a latte and watch a man in a pig costume read me terrible poetry. This is all weird art shit that I’ve done with my friends.

Ok, so, now that I’ve moved halfway across the Earth, now that I’ve settled in, I’m ready! For weird art. (For pancakes.) For making things. For creating. I can’t stop! It’s a thing I do. It’s a craving I have.

Now, who’s in Seoul and wants to go on an adventure to find some spray paint?

 

twinkies!

November 29, 2012
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Let’s talk about Twinkies for a minute.

Hey, there’s something I’ve never said before.

Everyone knows Hostess is going out of business. You know that, right? If not, sorry to break it to you like this: you’re probably never going to have a Twinkie again. Sorry.

I know, I know, this is tragic stuff. (Official first world problem?)

When the news broke, people rushed (literally) to grocery and convenience stores all over the country, buying up all the Twinkies. No, they weren’t doing it to stock up their pantries:

They did it to sell them on Ebay.

First of all, can we just talk about how stereotypically American this is?

1. Twinkies. 2. Selling shit on Ebay. 3. Selling Twinkies on Ebay (what even?). 4. Get rick quick schemes!

I hate it and I love it at the same time.

So, there was the Twinkie Rush of 2012. Maybe this’ll be what makes it in the history books from our generation. Sad? Maybe. Delicious? Um, not really.

Hey, there’s another point of mine: NO ONE EVEN LIKES TWINKIES.

No, you don’t. Let’s be real here – me and you. They’re gross. They’re squishy, fake cake, filled with white creamy sugary stuff. No.

So, if no one likes Twinkies, who exactly are these Ebay-sellers expecting to buy them? Especially at ridiculously high prices? No.

Anyway, everyone knows that the Twinkie is going to be sticking around. Some other company will buy up the recipe (or, will buy the large amount of never-expiring twinkie stock) and continue selling them under some other name for years and generations to come. Yum?

P.s. No, Twinkies cannot last forever. No, they will not survive the apocalypse (so if you did buy some ridiculously expensive snack cakes, you’d better get your money’s worth from them now… only a few weeks left!). They have a shelf life of 28 days! Mmm, Twinkies.

That is all.

throw it away

November 2, 2012
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You may have heard this one before: “I work at a grocery store.” It’s really not that exciting. It’s really not how I enjoy spending my time. But, you know, it pays (mostly) for school.

This morning, I went to work. 6 AM, baby. Yes, there are people awake at that hour. Sometimes, there are even people shopping at that hour. I know, I agree – they are insane.

I work in the produce department. Maybe you’ve heard of it? We have lettuce. We have apples. Etc, etc, etc.

We have what is technically called (in the produce biz) “perishable” food. That means most of it needs to be refrigerated. That means it is either fresh produce or freshly packaged produce, and expires/molds quickly. (Non-perishable would be canned or boxed stuff, stuff that doesn’t need refrigeration and can last for thousands of years on the shelves in your pantry.)

Sometimes, we have to throw our produce away. Sometimes this happens because it gets damaged (think: small child likes to poke holes into apples/peppers/anything slightly squishy), sometimes it happens because no one buys it before the expiration date (this is often the case for packaged produce).

This morning, I had to throw some of the latter away. Before we throw the stuff out, we have to scan all the barcodes to record what is getting thrown out. I did this. I scanned each package of salad/fruit/veggies out one by one and dropped them into an extra-large garbage can. Most of it looked perfectly fine. It wasn’t damaged; it wasn’t brown or moldy. It was simply past the date on the package, so I had to throw it out.

I do this all the time – throw away perfectly good food. It’s my job. Everyone at my store does it. Each night, multiple shopping carts full of trash bags full of food are thrown away. You get used to it, don’t even think about it – it’s expired, throw it away. It’s expired, throw it away.

This morning, though, I got angry. As I dropped bag by bag by cup of produce away, I got angry. Why?  Why was I doing this? Why couldn’t I give this stuff to someone? How many people in the world could use this food? How many people right here in my own city? 

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

I wonder how much perfectly good food is thrown away every day. I do my own share of it – along with  every other person who works at a grocery store, along with however many other people who work at  how ever many other places who throw away food that could go to people who need it.

Yes, there are expiration dates for a reason. And sometimes, stuff really does need to be used/thrown away by its expiration date. But not always, not usually.

It’s not only expired product, either. And today, it certainly wasn’t:

It’s November 2nd. Halloween is over, Thanksgiving is coming (along with Winter -eeek!). My store still had a giant box full of 30 or so Jack-O-Latern-sized pumpkins left over from Halloween. What did we do with all of those pumpkins?

We threw them away.

Why? I don’t know.

We could have marked the price down. Hell, people still would have bought them at their original price ($8, buy one get one free).

We could have donated them to our local food bank.

We could have given the damn things away for free.

No. We threw them away. Into the giant trash compactor they went.

Again, why? Why was this OK?

How is waste like this not illegal?

How many people could have used those pumpkins, for one thing or another?

Maybe they would have just carved them up as belated Jack-O-Lanterns. Maybe they would have simply plopped them on their front porches for Thanksgiving decorations. Maybe they would have only wanted them for the seeds. Maybe they would have made pumpkin pie. Maybe they wanted to shoot at them with their giant shotguns.

No. We threw them away. Without a second thought from the store manager. It was easier to deal with them that way – toss them out.

I think people forget about other people. I think they don’t care. I think they like to do what’s easiest for them. I think they are self-centered and narrow-minded.

I think they waste a lot of fucking pumpkins.

 

 

 

 

 

Californiacation, pt 5

July 7, 2012
Californiacation
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I’ve fallen in love in California.

His name is … frozen yogurt.

Yes, it’s true, I’ve found a new love. It is either very good or very bad that there are no frozen yogurt shops where I live. Both, I guess.

Yesterday we drove from LA to San Francisco.

The end.

Really, the drive took 6 hours, and it took another hour to find our hotel. So by the time we got settled in, it was getting late, and cold, in our new town.

But since we were starving, as per usual, we went out in search of chow – and got our first pedestrian glimpse of San Fran.

The first thing I noticed were the buildings. They’re small, compared to the buildings of LA, and cramped closely together – packed in tight on the hilly roads that are found here. They are beautiful – they look old, at least by big-city standards. The hotel we’re staying in here in San Fran is one of these buildings, and I can tell from the way it’s built that it’s definitely not a modern building. I think these structures give San Francisco a certain charm – and because of them I fell in love with the city a little bit as soon as I stepped foot into it.

I noticed the people of San Fran next. There were a lot of them – locals and tourists. I can always spot a local, no matter what city I find myself in. They have a certain look about them. They dress like they know what they’re doing. They know where they’re going and they plan to get there. The tourists here are similar to those found in other parts of California that I’ve seen – although here they’ve brought out their sweaters and long pants. Oh, did I mention – it’s cold here!

I guess I forgot that during our 6-hour drive, we were headed north. Northern California is cold, you guys! I am so glad I packed one pair of jeans and one sweater! Without them, I don’t think I’d make it here…

But, more about the people.

For some reason, I couldn’t figure this crowd out right away. Like, in LA, I felt like I understood them, like I knew how to blend in and make my way around. But here, even if I hadn’t had a bright-red sunburnt face, I felt like an outsider.

Suddenly, I didn’t know how to function. Walking down the road, I wondered, “Do I make eye contact? Do I stare at the ground? Do I smile? What do I do?”

I guess the etiquette here just seems different than LA – and it probably is. While still a big city, San Francisco is very different than Los Angeles.

Hopefully I’ll pick it up tomorrow as we explore the town.

Oh, and I almost forgot the good part!

We had Pizza Hut for dinner.

It is amazing how wonderful it feels carrying food “home” after not eating all day, and knowing that soon you will have a full belly.

And that is a fact I’m sure all San Franciscans can agree with. Yeah? See, I’m beginning to understand you already!

alone with yourself

March 8, 2012
Musings, Topics
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I may be going to the movies this week. Alone. (“what?!”, you say.)

My school’s having this free-movie-ticket day/party, and the one friend I usually go to these types of things with can’t go/I’m getting tired of going to these things with my one friend. (It’s sort of like in high school, when the teacher goes, “you can pick your partner to work with today!” and you turn to that one friend over and over again and just nod.)

Free movie tickets! The best things in life! I am so not passing this up. But, at the same time, I feel like it’s considered “weird” or “strange” to go to the movies alone. Who goes to movies alone? (“Hey, group of friends, look at that sad, lonely person sitting by themselves and eating popcorn with no one to share it with! What?!”)

In the same vein, it’s “weird”, maybe even weirder, to go to a restaurant alone. Why, though? Are restaurants strictly “social” places these days? Like clubs, or, um, golf courses? You just go there to eat stuff, yeah? And it’s not so weird to eat alone at, say, Taco Bell(? Where do you people eat these days?)

Another thing I’ve noticed: Cool people eat alone. I follow authors on the Twitter and they’re always going on about “oh going out to eat now for a bite of lunch where shall I sit since I am going alone?” (Not an actual Tweet.) When I read that, I don’t think it’s weird, what they’re doing. I admire them! Because it feels weird to do “alone” things that are meant to be “social” things, according to society (and that annoying group of friends that always sits behind you everywhere you go, including this website. Don’t look over your shoulder, b.t.w.).

If they can do it, so can I. Right? (So can you!) Being alone at the movies seems easier than dining alone, anyway. Once the movie starts, you become one with the staring, gaping, popcorn-popping crowd. (That feeling is awesome, b.t.w.)

Wow. So much b.t.w. is happening in this post. Should I stop typing now? Probably. But I’ll never do that!

Ok, so, I’m going to do this! (Maybe. There aren’t any good movies out, anyway, are there?) I’m pro at being alone. I need to practice being alone with lots of people around! …

(and, another one ending in the silent ellipses. You’re welcome, internet!)

P.s. Have you seen this fantastic internet video? How To Be Alone: